An understanding of a scientific concept is dependent on a person's ability to assimilate dynamic and increasingly complex interrelated processes. For example, in the fields of cellular and molecular biology, numerous cellular and molecular interactions must be understood to comprehend how biological processes are accomplished within complex systems at several different levels of organization.
Unfortunately, most tools for studying scientific concepts are passively visual or text-based. Textual-based learning relies on a person to create an abstraction of a microscopic structure or process by reading some published text. Such an approach has led people to perceive scientific concepts as a series of unconnected ideas or theories, rarely integrating their knowledge and allowing them to make connections with real-life phenomena. Visual tools such as illustrations, diagrams, and animations are not necessarily well-suited to the scientific concepts being studied. For example, some visual materials show scientific phenomena with deceptive clarity, offering an oversimplified view for the sake of clarity. In any case, visual and textual publications embody a limiting paradigm—the document can only show what the author has thought to include. A person studying from such a document is not typically led to new insights. As such, print and digital publications have limited applicability as tools for the synthesis of new information about the natural world.